Welcome to Nokia Experts, who is this guy?

Hello everyone and welcome to the Nokia Experts site. I wanted to put up an introductory post for all of you new readers so you know a bit about me and my history with mobile devices. My name is Matthew Miller and I am also known online as palmsolo, which is an online name I created many, many years ago due to my usage of Palm Pilots and my love of Star Wars and Han Solo. I am a father of three wonderful daughters and a husband to my wife of 15+ years. By day, I am a professional naval architect/ship designer who earned my Bachelor’s degree from the US Coast Guard Academy and my Master’s degree from University of California, Berkeley. I used to write for Geek.com’s PDA section and currently now write for ZDNet on the Mobile Gadgeteer and Smartphones and Cell Phones technical blogs.

First, thanks to Dieter and Marcus for giving me the opportunity to work with them and launch this new Nokia and S60 focused site. I follow all the outstanding Smartphone Experts family of sites and when I saw that the S60 mobile operating system was not being covered I made a proposal to launch a site. I do completely understand though that Nokia still has a rather limited presence in the smartphone market here in the U.S., but they are still the world leader and have made recent commitments to increasing their presence here so maybe with some open discussions here and elsewhere we can encourage Nokia to actively market themselves in the U.S. I also think with such a powerful platform there are a lot of you with questions about your device and I hope to use this site to help you out.

I started using mobile devices back in 1997 with the US Robotics Pilot 1000 that I used when I flew out onto the scene of maritime casualties to help refloat ships. The Palm Pilot immediately earned a spot in my heart and since then I have personally owned over 100 devices and tried out many more. I am pretty device agnostic for the most part and have AT&T and T-Mobile SIM cards that I pop in and out of many devices. I used a couple of Nokia devices (Series 60 at the time) back in the early 2000s and then in 2005 I was asked to be part of a unique group of bloggers who would get a chance to try out Nokia Nseries devices and provide honest feedback to Nokia. The Nokia Nseries Blogger Relations program has allowed me to test several Nseries devices that actually spurred me to buy other Nokia devices for myself (particularly the North American versions) and get quite familiar with S60 devices.

My current favorite devices are the Nokia N85 (review coming here soon), Nokia E71, Nokia 5800, Palm Treo Pro, T-Mobile G1, HTC Fuze, and original Apple iPhone. I also just received the XPERIA X1 (likely I may return it though) and am saving up for the Nokia N97.

I love the amazing media creation capabilities, complete customization functionality, 3rd party application support, outstanding phone and RF quality, and hardware designs of Nokia devices and am very excited to write about them here on Nokia Experts. Please feel free to contact me with any story ideas you want me to cover, devices you want me to buy/obtain for reviews, questions you have about any S60 or Nokia device, or anything else related to Nokia or S60 you wish to see discussed here. You can reach me at matthewATnokiaexpertsDOTcom.

[...] lacked, namely Nokia, S60, and the Symbian OS in general. He gives himself a brief introduction here, in the unlikely event you're not [...]

TallbruvaJanuary 27, 2009

Welcome Matt!!! I’ve already got an RSS feed to The Mobile Gadgeteer and started reading you because of videos I found on YouTube for the T-Mobile Shadow. Your reviews are very balanced and you try to see things from all angles. I look forward to your work here.

TallbruvaJanuary 27, 2009

Wish we had a site like this when I bought my Nokia E62 two years ago. I was just wondering three days ago why we didn’t have a Nokia Experts site.

Your site is what inspired me to get this one going. I love all your detailed reviews and think we will complement each other and help spread the word about S60 and Nokia products and services. That just means more people to visit both sites, right?

[...] to see that the brain behind Nokia Experts is none other than our MobileTechRoundup co-host Matt Miller. Matt has tried more Nokia phones than anyone outside of Finland and it’s great to see this [...]

Congrats on the new site, Matt! It looks great, and I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job, keeping me on my toes, as well! Glad to see Symbian-Guru already on your blogroll, and I’ve now got your RSS locked and loaded, looking forward to some great articles.

Ricky.

DaDudeJanuary 27, 2009

Hi Matt,

congratulations on your new website! I hope to see a lot of high quality content (like on your zdnet blogs) and hope that this site will be as successful as possible. Will there be a podcast about all those Nokia phones, or maybe a Smartphone Podcast together with all the bloggers from the other sites of the smartphone expert network?

On minor thing:
The Crackberry and Nokia Experts Symbols have been swapped, maybe you can swap then back, cause right now Nokia news are underneath the Crackberry header and vice versa.

Absolutely Matt, I’m a firm believe in the benefits of a large online community. I’ve certainly see the benefits of it as S60 / Symbian has become more popular on the web in the last 3 or so years. There’s an awful lot of device out there after all.

Gareth, the Smartphone Round Robin was one reason I jumped up and made a proposal to Dieter. I saw the gap in S60/Nokia coverage and was very pleased they decided to support this site launch. I look forward to the Round Robin next year since I do plan to focus my device usage down a bit to Nokia and Windows Mobile so the Round Robin will give me a chance to try out others I may not have seen.

Congratulations on the new site, Matthew. I’m been reading your pieces on The Mobile Gadgeteer for a while now and have to say no one does better hardware reviews than you.

Will you be adding a mobile web version of Nokia Experts. The current full-web version is rather slow loading in S60 WebKit even with 3G, although once loaded navigation isn’t bad.

It looks like you are using WordPress, there are a number of plugins that make mobilzing a WP blog a five minute job. I like the Alex King plugin (I think you are using it on the Mobile Gadgeteer) because the code is pretty easy to understand and thus to customize.

Neat, handsome, fast. Not you, your site, mate. Welcome. I think the greatest strength of Nokia is not its hardware, but bloggers and programmers like you, plugging away at advice and apps out of sheer dedication to the community.

[...] Nokia Experts, which is authored by AAS friend Matt Miller, is a new site which will focus on Nokia’s high-end mobile device offerings. There’s a review of the 5800 on the site and I’m told a launch competition is coming shortly. Matt also blogs for ZDNet on their Smartphone and Cellphone blog, which we’ve linked to regularly over the last few years. [...]

nice site – good to see more US nokians.
I’m giving the 5800 a long term review at the moment
and surprized by how much i like it – after an initial – wooahh this isn’t an iPhone inteface. Its somewhere inbetween – and the N97 will solve many of its issues.

Final releases are feature complete, polished and have been vetted by Mozilla’s QA [quality assurance] team. Beta releases are feature complete and intended for testing while development continues on clean up and general bug fixing. Alpha releases are intended for testing purposes only, while development continues on features that will be in the final release.

Pre-alpha (aka milestone) releases are intended to allow developers to try the in-progress work and report bugs. Milestone’s are important for mobile products due the the differences between various hardware platforms. They allow us to get early testing and bug reports on many more devices than we have access to. This particular milestone marks the first time Fennec is buildable for Windows Mobile from a publicly available repository, and we hope that will encourage outside developers to become involved in the project

nice site – good to see more US nokians. I’m giving the 5800 a long term review at the moment and surprized by how much i like it – after an initial – wooahh this isn’t an iPhone inteface. Its somewhere inbetween – and the N97 will solve many of its issues.

This particular milestone marks the first time Fennec is buildable for Windows Mobile from a publicly available repository, and we hope that will encourage outside developers to become involved in the project

One-handed use is great, though you’ll need two hands when the keyboard is open and you want to reach the upper-parts of the screen (unless you have sasquatch-hands and/or Nosferatu-hands. I’m in the latter camp, so I’m set)

Pre-alpha (aka milestone) releases are intended to allow developers to try the in-progress work and report bugs. Milestone’s are important for mobile products due the the differences between various hardware platforms. They allow us to get early testing and bug reports on many more devices than we have access to. This particular milestone marks the first time Fennec is buildable for Windows Mobile from a publicly available repository, and we hope that will encourage outside developers to become involved in the project

[...] and the folks here in the Smartphone Experts family let me launch Nokia Experts back in January 2009 as a way to share my passion for Nokia and its products and complete the full circle of mobile [...]

I’m impressed, I must say. Seldom do I encounter a blog that’s both educative and engaging,
and let me tell you, you’ve hit the nail on the head. The problem is something not enough folks are speaking intelligently about. I’m very happy that I came across this in my hunt for something relating to this.

[...] and the folks here in the Smartphone Experts family let me launch Nokia Experts back in January 2009 as a way to share my passion for Nokia and its products and complete the full circle of mobile [...]